Saturday, April 30, 2011

Hello, all, it's Jaybie coming at you again with the report on the same 1000 point tournament as Kasrkar. As you can tell by the picture above, I performed less than optimally. Not surprising, seeing as the list I took was:

4 Terminators w/ Combi-meltas, chainfists (Okay, yeah, the 50 point terminators hurt, but I didn't have time to convert them into obliterators)

vindicator w/ Demonic Possession

No pictures of the army, because it was barely painted, but I will get around to painting them soon, I promise!

So, on a warm Saturday morning, we stepped into the store, hoping for victory! In our little group of tournamenteers was Kasrkar, Kasrkar's bro, Grandpa Rhino, and myself. As people began to filter in for the tourney, I felt a litte confident; There were a lot of marine armies, just who I was hoping to play!

As first round was announced, I was not pleased when I heard that I was playing Kasrkar. I was of course beaten soundly, and thrown down to table 7 out of 8 for round 2. In other games, Grandpa Rhino ended up facing a guy who brought Blood Angels, and tabled him utterly, While Kasrkar's brother faced another blood angels army, and drew.

So, round 2, I get paired up with a guy named James, and when I ask him what he's running, he replies, "Guard." Great, just great, I think. I make an army to face marines, and what do I get? His list was, as far as I can remember:

The mission is Capture and control with pitched battle deployment, and he gets the first turn. He deploys his valks over to the left flank, with his CCS in one and a vet squad in another. He places his objective behind some ruins to his right flank, and sets some vets to watch over it, as well as his manticore. I deploy my objective opposite his, and put my CSMs to guard over it, and then I place the vindicator and the sorcerer/zerks opposite his objective as well, with the termies in reserve. I try to seize, I fail. Turn one his manticore opens up, immobilizing my zerk's rhino and the vindicator. My berzerkers decide to take the hit, and leg it across the board, and my termies come down turn 2, and blow his manticore sky-high. His valks open up on my berzerkers, forcing 21 saves. I roll. 2 1s, the rest 3 and above. This is about when my opponent started to get sour. my berzerkers and the last terminator slaughter the vets defending his objective.

This is when he does something which I still can't explain; he turbo-boosts his valkries a good 12" away from my objective, and then grav-chutes his vets and CCS out in front of my immobilized vehicles, meltas at them, and does nothing. I decide to capitalize on this, and run my csms away from the objective, and fire into the vets, causing 11 wounds, which should wipe them out. Then my opponent claims that he gets cover, because I'm firing over ground-level quicksand. I have to show him the section on cover in the rulebook, and so he finally gives in. with both of his troops dead, there's not much he can do, so we end game there, with a 1-0 victory to me!

In other games, Kasrkar pulled out a victory against some marines, Grandpa rhino lost to some Grey Knights on table 1, and Kasrkar's Brother put the hurt on some Salamanders.

Round 3, I was feeling confident, since I had been pushed up to table 5 with my victory. I was playing against some Space Wolves, and let me just say that this was probably one of the best games I have ever played. My opponent was a great sport, even though the dice completely deserted him (Seeing him roll 4 1s for his long fangs, and then laughing about it convinced me of this). This game was very tactical, and had I not made several tactical blunders, I could have killed off the last of his grey hunters and won the game, instead I lost, but I didn't mind.

So, after 3 great games of warhammer 40k, what was my final result? 15th!....Out of 16 people. But still, I had fulfilled my three goals going into it, which were: a) Win 1 game, b) don't get last, and 3) Never get tabled. The same store is having a 1250 tournament in a couple of weeks, and I intend to show the great guys there that the scions of chaos are never truly defeated...

Friday, April 29, 2011

Hey, folks, Kasrkar here, bringing you a quick post about an upcoming tourney.

My Imperial Guard will be attending May 7th, and hopefully doing as well as they did about a week ago.

Now, I haven't ever been to a 1500 point tourney, (or any other than 1000 points) so I figured that I would share my list with you folks. I have 8 days before it starts, so I'm open to suggestions. After the success of my 1000 point list, I tried to model this one after it a bit. Without further ado, here's the list I'm taking...

HQ:

-Company Command Squad, 4 meltaguns (90)

Elites:

-Psyker Battle Squadron, 8 dudes and an overseer (100)

-Chimera, multilaser/heavy bolter (55)

Troops:

-Platoon Command Squad, 1 autocannon, 1 grenade launcher (45)

-Infantry Squad Alpha, commissar, autocannon (95)

-Infantry Squad Bravo, autocannon (60)

-Infantry Squad Charlie, autocannon (60)

-Veteran Squad Alpha, 3 meltaguns (100)

-Veteran Squad Bravo, 3 meltaguns, 1 autocannon (110)

-Chimera, multilaser/heavy bolter (55)

Fast Attack:

-Vendetta, 3 TL lascannons, carrying CCS (130)

-Vendetta, 3 TL lascannons, carrying vet squad alpha (130)

Heavy Support:

-Leman Russ Battle Tank, hull heavy bolter (150)

-Manticore, hull heavy bolter (160)

-Manticore, hull heavy flamer (160)

It adds up to exactly, 1500, naturally, and I'm pretty happy with it. Has a decent model count, good foundation, etc.

From my experience at the last tourney, I learned to always take a very balanced list. It seems that 1 player is always the offensive player, and the other is the defensive player. In the resulting war of attrition, it comes down to staying power and versatility of units. In the 1000 pointer, I was arbitrarily positioned to be the offensive player in 2/3 games, so from that point on, I've tried to include atleast SOME offensive units in my lists. This is seen here in the fast-moving melta and overall relatively mechanized force. With that, the blob is the core of my defensive deployment, and crucial for objective games.

Hoping that little tip will be useful, as I lucked out by taking a versatile list to that 1000 point tournament.

That sums up the article...tell me what you think, and don't forget to sub! Hopefully I can get Jaybie to post some stuff soon, as you're all probably getting tired of my cheesy guard.

Saturday, April 23, 2011

Just finished a little local tourney a few hours ago, and unfortunately, I completely forgot to take pictures. Either way, I thought I'd share the experience with you with some wordy summaries of the games.

Pictured above is a really terrible picture of the army I took. It was 1,000 points, and the force org was 0-1 HQ, 0-1 Elites, 0-2 Troops, 0-1 Fast Attack, and 0-1 Heavy Support. With that I'll give you my list, and then head straight into the first game.

HQ:

Company Command Squad, 4 meltaguns

Elites:

Psyker Battle Squadron, 7 psykers, 1 overseer

Chimera, multilaser/heavy bolter

Troops:

Platoon Command Squad, 1 autocannon, 2 grenade launchers

Chimera, multilaser/heavy bolter

Infantry Squad Alpha, autocannon, commissar

Infantry Squad Bravo, autocannon

Infantry Squad Charlie, autocannon

Veteran Squad, 3 meltaguns, 1 autocannon team

Chimera, multilaser/heavy bolter

Fast Attack:

Vendetta Gunship, 3 TL lascannons

Heavy Support:

Leman Russ Battle Tank, battle cannon/HB

Round 1:

So, my first opponent actually turned out to be Jaybie and his chaos marines. This was a pretty quick and forward game. Deployment/mission was DoW annihilation. Basically, on my first turn, the vendetta blew up his vindicator, and various other shots wrecked one of his rhinos, pinning the guys inside, and did every possible non-destroyed result on the other rhino. His berzerkers and sorcerer managed 3 kill points, but by turn 5 he only had 1 unit, I had 6 KPs, and his only unit was choosing to hide. 1 victory goes to the guard

Round 2:

I'll start out by saying that my enemy this round was a huge sourpuss. He took one look at my list and decided to not even try, but to simply bunker up in a reinforced, LoS blocking building with his whole army. The mission was capture and control, and the deployment was pitched battle. His list consisted of Pedro, 2 tac squads in rhinos with fists, missle launchers and flamers, 2 multimelta attack bikes, a sternguard squad with 2 lascannons, and a thunderfire cannon. Basically, my infantry squads blobbed together and took my objective which was behind LoS, and the rest of my army (barring the vets in a vendetta) went on the offensive. As the turns went by, Pedro took 2 wounds, all of the sternguard died, the techmarine died, and the attack bikes died. On turn 3, my vendetta outflanked and zipped to the middle, failing to be harmed by the krak missle flying at it. On turn 4, things went pretty crazy, and I managed to wreck one of his rhinos, kill 8 of the marines inside, and cause them to flee, in addition to melting Pedro. On turn 5, my vendetta flew over some ruins to contest his objective. The game ended. I can't help but thing that the guy deserved to lose, since he wasn't even trying to win, and all he did during the game was frown at his dudes. For the record, he got 55/1,000 of my victory points. 2 wins for the guard...

Round 3:

Final game was against a really cool grey knights player named Allan, who certainly knew how to bring the hurt. Mission was sieze ground, with spearhead deployment. His list had 6 purifiers w/ a bunch of crazy junk, 5 terminators w/ 2 psycannons, a psyfleman, a beefed out librarian, 6 grey knights w/ a psycannon, and 2 psybolt heavy bolter razorbacks. To be frank, he was completely owning me for the first 5 turns. I was rolling pretty badly, and he was making every save. He also had 3 objectives to my 0 for 5 turns. I went into the game knowing that he could easily assault any unit off of his objective, so I decided to try to shoot him out of the objective-heavy center. This plan would have worked quite well, but Allan made pretty much every single cover/armor save he had to make at the start, and his firepower was not to be underestimated. Luckily, on turn 5, his high-rolling actually hurt him, as he rolled double 6s on the terminator leadership test, I had an immobilized chimera within 6" of them as well. We were told that due to time restrictions, turn 6 would be the last. After moving my psykers further out of pschic hood range, I managed to kill all but 1 of the grey knight strike squad members, and made my psychic test for weaken resolve. He rolls a 7 on his leadership, and they run off of the objectives, leaving us both with nothing...the game ends in a draw. After calculating victory points, I discovered that I had actually given him quite a thrashing, getting around 800 VPs to his 375. This also got me an unofficial tie-breaker victory. Allan was a fantastic player, and I'm very appreciative that I had the chance to play against him. He ended up coming in 3rd place overall, and had I not tied him, he would have gotten 1st. The tourney ended with me having 2 victories and one draw/tie-breaker victory.

Summary:

I got 2nd place overall. I had a really good list, but there was a dark eldar player that actually scored 3 more victory points than I did...oh well! I got to play a familiar person, a cranky person that tried to disqualify me and cheat me of VPs, and a really cool, decent player. Was a wonderful experience, and I'll naturally be trying to cover more local tourneys in the future. Ideally they will have pictures...

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

IG Elites...the worst of the best. They are all so much better than regular guardsmen, but you actually have to pay a non-cheesy amount of points per squad for them...pft.

Hey, folks, Kasrkar here, with another breakdown of sorts. Forgot the topic that I wanted to do, so I figured I'd look into IG elites a little more in this post. Again, it's been a little while, so forgive me. The Elites section has always interested me in that it sort of isn't amazing, unlike almost the entirety of the rest of the book. Anyway, let's start this little breakdown with the gentleman pictured above!

-Marbo-Summary: Where to begin...this guy is basically Rambo with a letter in his name swapped for another. He comes with a plethora of sneaky rules, including stealth, fleet, move through cover, fearless, and a mandatory lictor-like infiltrate deployment. He cannot join a squad, and has a fairly nice statline of WS5, BS5, S3, T3, W2, I5, A4. Also has a few little special wargear pieces, including a pretty useless yet awesome sniper pistol, a 2+ poisoned close combat weapon and a demo charge.

-Verdict: I've used him several times, and in each game he has really added a lot of fun and flair. While he isn't super potent/survivable and tends to actually blow himself up a lot, He can be a handy little distraction for 65 points. IG players, take him, atleast in fun games. You'll be surprised by how much he adds. I think that we IG players have had our fun annihilating people, and that most of us need to add a few more dinky units like Marbo into our lists.

-Ogryns-Summary: 40 points per model gets you WS4, BS3, S5, T5, W3, I2, A3. Yeah...wow. Each guy also comes with furious charge and a ripper gun, which is S5, AP- assault 3 12". I would honestly like to see ogryns on the table more, but I don't expect that since a single ogryn is 20 frakking dollars. Really, GW, is that really very necessary? Not cool at all, if you want a squad of 10 of these guys, good for you, but your wallet gets my sympathy.

-Verdict: I've only seen ogryns in action a few times, and whenever I do see them, they don't tend to do a lot. The most I've really seen 3 ogryns do is mow down 80 points of fire dragons, which isn't too difficult. I still think there's a lot of fun to be had with these guys, and 5 ogryns and Yarrick in a chimera sounds uber tempting. I really wouldn't advise taking these guys. Marbo is one thing because he's easy and fun to convert, but a $100 squad of 5 is too rediculous. Still, if you're feeling ogryn fever, just throw some ogre leadbelchers from fantasy on some round bases. They're actually half the price of ogryns, and don't look any more strange in an IG army than the ogryn models.

-Storm Troopers-Summary: So, basically a regular guardsmen with BS4, a 4+ save, an extra close combat weapon attack, krak grenades, and an 18" AP3 lasgun. That sounds like quite a bit more than it is, since these dudes each cost as much as a space marine. They come with deepstrike for free, and also have an interesting little rule called 'Special Operations'. This allows them to get one of the following: Scouts and move through cover, the ability to re-roll the scatter die when deep-striking, or infiltrate and having their weapons count as pinning the first time they fire. I will admit that they are bit overcosted, but I know a lot of players (myself included) that have kicked some ass with them.

-Verdict: First of all, the models are pretty darn cool, and not as expensive as some of the other elites. I have scouted these guys, deep struck them, outflanked them, and thrown them in a valkyrie. I can say with ease that the valkyrie option is the most effective. I've learned that these guys really aren't that bad for their points. Taking a bare 10 man squad with no upgrades has served me well, and they often can make up their points without much trouble. Proxy some of these guys. I've enjoyed using them a lot, and they actually have quite a bit of kill potential. With that, I add one more thing...how can a gun be S3 and AP3? It punches right through power armor, but it has trouble with skin.

Well, that wraps up this post. I discovered that covering all of the elites choices would reek of TLDRness. At some point soon I will be covering the psyker battle squadron and ratlings. I will try to post more regularly, and get some slightly more interesting content going. The breakdowns come easily to me, and with this I would like to try and get more IG players using storm troopers and such. Comment if you'd like, tell me if you want me to cover a certain army, or rant more on the mechanics themselves over armies. I intend to try and paint up my IG and get some decent battle reports coming in as well.